This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

memories were all pictures without sound.

When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair.

Things were always changing, even when they didn’t feel like it.

Everyone had to make their own mistakes.

she could have chosen a hundred different things and had a hundred different lives.

What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence.

“I guess my real question is how do you know which choices matter, and which ones are just dumb?”

“Everything matters,” Melinda said. “But you can change your mind. Almost always.”

Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you.

a body she hardly remembered as it was, because she’d been so busy seeing it as something it wasn’t.

It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.

there was only a tiny number of people who set you on your path.

everything mattered, but nothing was fixed.

All the tiny pieces added together to make a life, but the pieces could always be rearranged.

I was too young to really know what my choices were going to mean—there’s not really any way to find out what you need to find out, you know?

Soon. Alice thought that it was probably exactly the inverse, the mirror image, of how it felt to be pregnant, and to know that your life would never be the same. A subtraction instead of an addition.

It’s not about the time. It’s about how you spend it. Where you put your energy—”

resolution—it doesn’t exist.”

We all do what we have to do, make our own decisions about how to behave. What we want to do, what we need to do,”